Censorship in the digital age: ‘Words are more powerful than ever’

As part of its Keep Toronto Reading festival, featuring Ray Bradburys 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451, the Toronto Reference Library invited John Ralston Saul, president of PEN International, and Charles Foran, president of PEN Canada, to go to the library on Thursday to talk about censorship in the digital age. Here, they give an idea of the issues they will discuss:

Charles Foran: In Fahrenheit 451, a woman self-immolates with her forbidden home library rather than watch the books be burned. The novel suggests that books are where ideas, history, even human consciousness get stored. Is their status different in the digital age?

John Ralston Saul: You look around the world in 2013 and you say: How many prime ministers or presidents are in prison? One or two. How many generals or bankers? Two or three. But how many writers? 850 or so. Plus, the new fashion is, Dont torture or imprison the writers, just kill them. PEN tracks dozens killed every year. Books, words, are more powerful than ever, and more frightening to those in power.

Foran: And yet the perception is that other forms of expression, in particular those associated with digital technologies, now dominate. Are you sure books are still worth dying for?

Saul: We shouldnt obsess about the book in its traditional form. People are always saying its the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, its a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, its a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.

Foran: A blogger or tweeter is at greater risk than a novelist or poet.

Saul: Certain governments are suggesting that bloggers and tweeters arent real writers, and so dont merit protection. A writer is anyone from a Nobel laureate to a debut blogger. They all get PENs attention.

Foran: I wonder about the attention span of digital culture itself, whether it is even built to house those ideas, preserve that history, contain that consciousness. Its too scattered and unfocused.

Saul: The danger is that the sophisticated managers of power can employ these uncertain new mechanisms to shut down freedom of expression. What were witnessing is a war between those who want to use the Internet for freedom and those who want to use it for financial gain, and/or to control.

Foran: Ron Deibert, head of Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, talks about the exploding new cyber-industrial complex. Corporations, including Canadian ones, are selling governments cyberspace software that allows them to hack, spy and survey their citizens, sometimes by methods that are illegal within national jurisdictions. Theres big money in aiding and abetting oppression on the Net.

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Censorship in the digital age: ‘Words are more powerful than ever’